Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Part 1: Resurrection
While I haven't updated in a while (first because I was too embarassed, later because I was too busy) the saga has continued these past few weeks. With my desk finally clear for Bertha, I realized it was time to bring back my "Wing Commander Computer."
FLASHBACK!
You all may remember some years back I was working on a pretty neat "Wing Commander Computer." It was a Pentium III with five, count 'em, five different sound cards capable of playing the fancy MIDI music for every PC Wing Commander. The idea was to have the best possible machine to run the original games. It also had three video cards! It was a darned impressive computer that I loved like a son or daughter.
Then, the mission got in the way. When we visited Mythic for the big archiving project a few years ago, we quickly needed to rig a computer with a SCSI card so we could read Origin's old DAT tapes and SyQuest disks. The Wing Commander Computer was down for the count at the time, suffering from a bad PSU. I considered buying an old computer at the junk shop for Mythic, but instead decided to pick up an extremely fancy power supply. I would quickly repair Wing Commander Computer, use it for the project and then rebuild it better than ever when we were done. After all, building the thing was a good deal of the fun. So I pulled out all of my esoteric sound and video hardware, formatted the lovingly dual-booted hard drive and loaded XP.
WCC Lite performed beautifully, recovering dozens of SyQuests, DATs and 5.25" disks. That is... until a member of our expedition--let's call him John--opened it up to swap out a SCSI card. What this... I'm trying not to use the word moron (sorry, man)... didn't realize is that he was wearing a magnetized Electronic Arts key dongle around his neck at the time. And with a wack, the dangling dongle did destroy! (Put that line on the poster.) Something about Wing Commander Computer was dead on impact--probably the RAM.
So instead of a hero's welcome, WCC went to my parents' house in a coffin. It was put on a bench in the workshop next to all the other old computer skeletons and a stack of childhood PS/2 Model 80s that no one could bare to throw away. There it slept and there it stayed for... sorry, Guy Clark. But yeah, a thick malaise now surrounded Wing Commander Computer. I pushed it out of my mind, thinking slightly that someday I'd return. Life went on: WCC's former desk became storage, old cards and cables from other computers and projects stacked on top of beautiful MIDI cards in their static protection bags... and so the great Wing Commander Computer became more of a distant ideal than a thing that was ever real.
FLASHFORWARD!
Reinvigorated by my success with Bertha, I decided to restore the Wing Commander Computer. I immediately ordered a simple VGA switch box from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BSN1NE) and I had high hopes that I could get it booting again easily. I already had the RAM, even: my experiment in adding memory to Bertha had been an abject failure (it just didn't fit!) and so I had a good dozen 128-meg SIMMs perfect for it sitting right there in little pink baggies. The VGA switch arrived the next day and it was GO TIME!
... or was it? I had months earlier recovered WCC's fancy cards and now I stacked them on the desk: a Voodoo 5500 3dfx card, a simple Trident PCI video card, a Hollywood+ DVD Decoder, a SoundBlaster 32 AWE, a SoundBlaster Live and Roland RAP-10 and LAPC-Is. Then I went out to the workshop to find Wing Commander Computer. And I found... nothing. The computer skeletons were gone! The PS/2s were still there, boxes of MCA cards and miles and miles of obscure cables... leftover SCSI drives I'd dumped there after Mythic... but the various PC cases were gone. Had my dad turned Wing Commander Computer into something? No one was around, so I looked through the array of computers in his office. There were several apparent monsterpieces, file servers cobbled together from drives that COULD have belong to WCC... but no sign of the motherboard or case.
I tracked down my mother and asked her: what had happened to all the broken computers? Oh, she said, I think your father took those a while ago... pause for dramatic effect... and put them in the basement. THE BASEMENT! The word chilled me to my very bone. If there's a hell to go to, I know it can't be worse than that basement. A terrifying, unfinished basement that floods in the winter and then floods with live snakes in the summer. It's packed to the gills with a creepy collection of old children's toys, live ammunition and Navy equipment stolen by my grandfather. And Wing Commander Computer was THERE? Hope was dead.
Still, I activated the goofy flashlight app on my iPhone, put on my shoes and headed down to see if there was anything left. It was like something out of a survival horror film. I'd flash my light in a corner and find a gutted IBM AT or a DAT tape server or the old IBM Aptiva... but no Wing Commander Computer. But just was I was going to give up on the dream of saving WCC, I noticed: the area underneath the rickety wooden stairs was FULL of computer cases. A dozen of them, stacked like corpses, except creepier. Frantically, I dug through them. I knew that if WCC were on the bottom then it would have been soaked in floods... and then I found it! Stacked atop a sad blue Dell which once belonged to a little girl and would never be loved again.
I rushed out of that terror filled hellscape and returned it to my work area, the same expanse of carpet that a few weeks earlier had held Bertha as she was nursed back to life. But the joy of the reunion was short lived: Wing Commander Computer was in a bad way. He had been haphazardly stripped for parts: the DVD drive was gone and in its place an apparently unwanted first generation drive had been shoved in the slot unconnected. Internal cables and most impressively screws were all missing. The sides of the case were gone, location unknown. She was a metal skeleton with an entirely yellowed faceplate. Oddly, the expensive over-the-top 650V power supply I had bought for Mythic was still there; apparently the cannibals who did this had assumed the PSU was bad. The motherboard and processor were still in place, a Pentium III 650 on an aBit BX6 Revision 1 that had exactly the right number of ISA slots... I guess that wouldn't have interested anyone else. And the neat-o 5.25"/3.5" combo drive was still bolted in place.
I am not going to sleep today, I said out loud to no one in particular, until I get this computer booting again. I dusted and dusted and then reattached the internals. Oh, how I had missed the days of IDE ribbons. I put the crummy ancient DVD drive in anyway, although I assumed it was bad. Finally, powered it up, it whirred to life and beeped me a message. Google quickly told me that, as I'd expected months earlier, it meant there was a problem with the RAM. I swapped the DIMM that some moron (sorry, John) had destroyed with one from Bertha's aborted memory upgrade, tried again. I pressed the button--the fan came on, the parts fuzzed, the drive spun... no beeps! WCC was starting up!
... except there was no picture at all. Huh? Had my Voodoo 5 gone bad somehow? That would be a real shame. I swapped it out with the Trident card and started the process again. Whirr buzz buzz whirr BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Huh? Internet, what's that mean? NO DISPLAY ADAPTER. Damn, damn, damn! Oh shit: were all of Wing Commander Computer's old cards bad? Had some kind of electrical storm destroyed my beautiful sound and video cards? Or were WCC's slots all blowed up? There was only one way to find out: try another video card. I fished a silly looking modern PCI card with a GIANT FAN out of another machine and...
Crap, it worked. All my cool equipment must be gone.
But wait, my amazing brain then said. Why was there a BIOS message for the Trident and not the Voodoo? That's kind of weird, right? Shouldn't it have said no adapter for both instances? I tried both cards again and got the same disparity: an error message on the Trident, booting without an image on the Voodoo. Then it occured to me: I am an idiot. The Voodoo 5, the king of all graphics cards, has its own power kajigger, just like a drive. And I hadn't plugged it in. One, two and BAM!
SUCCESS!
No idea what was wrong with the Trident (YET), but at least it meant my whole stack of cool toys wasn't dead. I spent another frustrating hour trying to figure out why it wasn't reading the hard drive or the DVD-ROM (short answer: the CD drive was in the wrong place on the ribbon AND its jumper wasn't set to slave)... but eventually an emotionally exhausted LOAF with a computer skeleton booting to Windows XP went to bed.
(I'll add some pictures tonight like in the old thread--I can't seem to offload them from my phone while I'm at work.)
While I haven't updated in a while (first because I was too embarassed, later because I was too busy) the saga has continued these past few weeks. With my desk finally clear for Bertha, I realized it was time to bring back my "Wing Commander Computer."
FLASHBACK!
You all may remember some years back I was working on a pretty neat "Wing Commander Computer." It was a Pentium III with five, count 'em, five different sound cards capable of playing the fancy MIDI music for every PC Wing Commander. The idea was to have the best possible machine to run the original games. It also had three video cards! It was a darned impressive computer that I loved like a son or daughter.
Then, the mission got in the way. When we visited Mythic for the big archiving project a few years ago, we quickly needed to rig a computer with a SCSI card so we could read Origin's old DAT tapes and SyQuest disks. The Wing Commander Computer was down for the count at the time, suffering from a bad PSU. I considered buying an old computer at the junk shop for Mythic, but instead decided to pick up an extremely fancy power supply. I would quickly repair Wing Commander Computer, use it for the project and then rebuild it better than ever when we were done. After all, building the thing was a good deal of the fun. So I pulled out all of my esoteric sound and video hardware, formatted the lovingly dual-booted hard drive and loaded XP.
WCC Lite performed beautifully, recovering dozens of SyQuests, DATs and 5.25" disks. That is... until a member of our expedition--let's call him John--opened it up to swap out a SCSI card. What this... I'm trying not to use the word moron (sorry, man)... didn't realize is that he was wearing a magnetized Electronic Arts key dongle around his neck at the time. And with a wack, the dangling dongle did destroy! (Put that line on the poster.) Something about Wing Commander Computer was dead on impact--probably the RAM.
So instead of a hero's welcome, WCC went to my parents' house in a coffin. It was put on a bench in the workshop next to all the other old computer skeletons and a stack of childhood PS/2 Model 80s that no one could bare to throw away. There it slept and there it stayed for... sorry, Guy Clark. But yeah, a thick malaise now surrounded Wing Commander Computer. I pushed it out of my mind, thinking slightly that someday I'd return. Life went on: WCC's former desk became storage, old cards and cables from other computers and projects stacked on top of beautiful MIDI cards in their static protection bags... and so the great Wing Commander Computer became more of a distant ideal than a thing that was ever real.
FLASHFORWARD!
Reinvigorated by my success with Bertha, I decided to restore the Wing Commander Computer. I immediately ordered a simple VGA switch box from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BSN1NE) and I had high hopes that I could get it booting again easily. I already had the RAM, even: my experiment in adding memory to Bertha had been an abject failure (it just didn't fit!) and so I had a good dozen 128-meg SIMMs perfect for it sitting right there in little pink baggies. The VGA switch arrived the next day and it was GO TIME!
... or was it? I had months earlier recovered WCC's fancy cards and now I stacked them on the desk: a Voodoo 5500 3dfx card, a simple Trident PCI video card, a Hollywood+ DVD Decoder, a SoundBlaster 32 AWE, a SoundBlaster Live and Roland RAP-10 and LAPC-Is. Then I went out to the workshop to find Wing Commander Computer. And I found... nothing. The computer skeletons were gone! The PS/2s were still there, boxes of MCA cards and miles and miles of obscure cables... leftover SCSI drives I'd dumped there after Mythic... but the various PC cases were gone. Had my dad turned Wing Commander Computer into something? No one was around, so I looked through the array of computers in his office. There were several apparent monsterpieces, file servers cobbled together from drives that COULD have belong to WCC... but no sign of the motherboard or case.
I tracked down my mother and asked her: what had happened to all the broken computers? Oh, she said, I think your father took those a while ago... pause for dramatic effect... and put them in the basement. THE BASEMENT! The word chilled me to my very bone. If there's a hell to go to, I know it can't be worse than that basement. A terrifying, unfinished basement that floods in the winter and then floods with live snakes in the summer. It's packed to the gills with a creepy collection of old children's toys, live ammunition and Navy equipment stolen by my grandfather. And Wing Commander Computer was THERE? Hope was dead.
Still, I activated the goofy flashlight app on my iPhone, put on my shoes and headed down to see if there was anything left. It was like something out of a survival horror film. I'd flash my light in a corner and find a gutted IBM AT or a DAT tape server or the old IBM Aptiva... but no Wing Commander Computer. But just was I was going to give up on the dream of saving WCC, I noticed: the area underneath the rickety wooden stairs was FULL of computer cases. A dozen of them, stacked like corpses, except creepier. Frantically, I dug through them. I knew that if WCC were on the bottom then it would have been soaked in floods... and then I found it! Stacked atop a sad blue Dell which once belonged to a little girl and would never be loved again.
I rushed out of that terror filled hellscape and returned it to my work area, the same expanse of carpet that a few weeks earlier had held Bertha as she was nursed back to life. But the joy of the reunion was short lived: Wing Commander Computer was in a bad way. He had been haphazardly stripped for parts: the DVD drive was gone and in its place an apparently unwanted first generation drive had been shoved in the slot unconnected. Internal cables and most impressively screws were all missing. The sides of the case were gone, location unknown. She was a metal skeleton with an entirely yellowed faceplate. Oddly, the expensive over-the-top 650V power supply I had bought for Mythic was still there; apparently the cannibals who did this had assumed the PSU was bad. The motherboard and processor were still in place, a Pentium III 650 on an aBit BX6 Revision 1 that had exactly the right number of ISA slots... I guess that wouldn't have interested anyone else. And the neat-o 5.25"/3.5" combo drive was still bolted in place.
I am not going to sleep today, I said out loud to no one in particular, until I get this computer booting again. I dusted and dusted and then reattached the internals. Oh, how I had missed the days of IDE ribbons. I put the crummy ancient DVD drive in anyway, although I assumed it was bad. Finally, powered it up, it whirred to life and beeped me a message. Google quickly told me that, as I'd expected months earlier, it meant there was a problem with the RAM. I swapped the DIMM that some moron (sorry, John) had destroyed with one from Bertha's aborted memory upgrade, tried again. I pressed the button--the fan came on, the parts fuzzed, the drive spun... no beeps! WCC was starting up!
... except there was no picture at all. Huh? Had my Voodoo 5 gone bad somehow? That would be a real shame. I swapped it out with the Trident card and started the process again. Whirr buzz buzz whirr BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Huh? Internet, what's that mean? NO DISPLAY ADAPTER. Damn, damn, damn! Oh shit: were all of Wing Commander Computer's old cards bad? Had some kind of electrical storm destroyed my beautiful sound and video cards? Or were WCC's slots all blowed up? There was only one way to find out: try another video card. I fished a silly looking modern PCI card with a GIANT FAN out of another machine and...
Crap, it worked. All my cool equipment must be gone.
But wait, my amazing brain then said. Why was there a BIOS message for the Trident and not the Voodoo? That's kind of weird, right? Shouldn't it have said no adapter for both instances? I tried both cards again and got the same disparity: an error message on the Trident, booting without an image on the Voodoo. Then it occured to me: I am an idiot. The Voodoo 5, the king of all graphics cards, has its own power kajigger, just like a drive. And I hadn't plugged it in. One, two and BAM!
SUCCESS!
No idea what was wrong with the Trident (YET), but at least it meant my whole stack of cool toys wasn't dead. I spent another frustrating hour trying to figure out why it wasn't reading the hard drive or the DVD-ROM (short answer: the CD drive was in the wrong place on the ribbon AND its jumper wasn't set to slave)... but eventually an emotionally exhausted LOAF with a computer skeleton booting to Windows XP went to bed.
(I'll add some pictures tonight like in the old thread--I can't seem to offload them from my phone while I'm at work.)